Paul is showing images from a new project 'An Exploration of People and Landscape along the Welsh/English Border.'
Beyond maps and politics, the border between England and Wales is invisible, yet it is seen alternatively as a line of tension or conflict; a conduit for exchange of ideas; paths of meeting and trade.
“Found in the Earth” is a new photographic series of environmental portraits and living landscapes being created as a way of introducing himself to a new sense of place and encounters. The project surfaced by chance through conversations with friends in addition to a change in his own environment when he moved to Mid Wales in 2020, 3 weeks before the first Covid lockdown after 20 years of living in the Yorkshire Dales.
Paul's subjects are / will be farmers, foresters, artists and gardeners, archaeologists, quarrymen and rangers amongst many others, who share a common connection with the land. They will have made their homes and livelihoods between the Welsh Mountains and English River beds in the wake of English King Offa and the first Prince of Wales, Owain Glyndŵr. Amongst the portraits on show at Found are a stone carver, a bat ecologist, some free miners, a horse logger, a salmon fisher .....
As a documentary and travel photographer, Paul is continually interested in the cultural and social aspects of a defined region and how they alter or enhance the surrounding landscapes. The stories of these relationships are often lost in sparsely populated areas and rarely seen by those who merely pass through on their way to somewhere else.
As we climb out of pandemic restrictions and into an intriguing, uncertain but hopefully optimistic future, this project will allow Paul extended periods of time documenting landscapes and individuals along the border from the River Dee Estuary in the North to the River Severn Estuary in the South.